One day during training, Hinata got paired up with Kiba.
She didn't really talk a lot with the boy, and most of what she knew of him came from watching his interactions with Naruto. The boy was brash, loud, and more than a little intimidating. To be honest, Hinata didn't really want to spar with him, but it wasn't as if she had a choice once Iruka called their names.
"I am going to sweep the floor with you" he said, canines shining under the sunlight and a competitive glint in his eyes.
Hinata was immediately intimidated.
Despite this, she did her best, and in the end even managed to win the spar, much to her surprise. Kiba came up to her afterwards and congratulated her by patting her rather harshly on the back, but other than that there seemed to be no hard feelings between them.
She told Sasuke this later on, when they got together to train after school.
"It doesn't surprise me you won. You have gotten a lot better, you know? Definitely above that mutt's level."
"…I don't think it's nice to call a classmate a mutt" she admonished, although she was undeniably happy at the praise that came very rarely from him. Hinata had also gotten the feeling she was all-around better than she used to be, along with more confident in her own abilities. She couldn't help but think it was all thanks to Sasuke, who had, slowly but surely, pushed her beyond the limitations her own mind had created for her.
"Does it matter what I call him?" the boy answered uninterestedly. He grabbed some shuriken from his pouch and aimed towards the target some ways back. "Besides, I don't understand why you would be intimidated of him at all. If you take away his penchant to cause trouble at a village-scale level and the fact the mutt isn't actually useless as a shinobi, Kiba and Naruto are pretty much the same person."
He threw the shuriken, landing every single one. Hinata frowned at his comparison.
"That's not… that's not true…"
A snort was her answer.
"Let's see if I got it correctly" he raised a hand, lifting a finger for every thing he listed. "He's loud, a troublemaker, claims to everyone that would listen that he'll become the next Hokage, has awful grades…"
"Those are all external-level similarities!" she exclaimed before he could go on. Sasuke scoffed.
"But similarities all the same. So, as I said, I don't understand why you would be so intimidated by idiot number two."
He walked over towards the target to retrieve his shuriken, leaving Hinata thinking about his words. If one looked at it from the outside, Sasuke was right. Kiba and Naruto had a lot of similarities, both in their behavior and the way they presented themselves. However, there were plenty of differences as well. Kiba had a loving family, the acceptance of his classmates, and no one ever made fun of him when he claimed he wanted to be the Hokage. Naruto had always been alone, and had an aura to him where you could tell he knew, deeply and intricately, what loneliness was, unlike Kiba who seemed to take everything as a joke.
It wasn't as if that made Naruto better than Kiba, of course not, but to Hinata, it made all the difference.
"Are you finally ready to spar?" Sasuke's voice took her out of her musings as he approached her, shuriken in hand. "We have the whole evening ahead of us."
"I… I am ready" she nodded, getting into position as he put away his shuriken. Whatever the case, it wasn't as if she would need to think about Kiba a lot, as the two of them never really talked or spent time together, nor did Hinata see any reason they would do so in the future.